Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Terrain Tuesday: Imperial Parkway

note: Apologies to folks that saw updates for all my posts. I've started using Windows Live Journal to post and I'm still learning. I think I got the hang of not blowing up the system though.

I have a confession to make:

I love making terrain. It’s a blast for me to cobble together all sorts of bits and bobs to make a nice City-Fight (I guess it’s called Cities of Death now) piece or a nifty industrial bit. I like how you start with nothing but craft supplies and end the process with a piece of terrain worth fighting over!

In an effort to reduce the size of my “terrain” bits box before I potentially move, I’ve decided to try and create as much terrain as I can over these summer months. It’s probably silly as moving with terrain means potentially broken terrain, but my wife might be upset when I pay the movers to carry a box full stuff that to the untrained eye, appears to be trash. The life of a hobbyist is complicated indeed!

For this Tuesday, I finished a project I started ages ago, an Imperial Parkway. The idea was simple enough. Take the leftover foamcore from cutting out the windows to my broken Cathedral and create a fence on a small bit of board. Sidewalks and eventually a statue. Nice bit of cover-creating terrain that wasn’t rubble.

For the bases of the statues I blatantly stolen the idea from Ricalopia. In case none of you have been over there, this guy is frakkin’ talented as hell and is a veritable GOLD MINE of ideas that inspire you to produce. The specific idea I stole was from his Imperial Objectives pieces. He used the non-bolters detail bits from the Bastions to make pillars. Simple, effective, genius…stolen!

I then grabbed 2 brutalized marines from an Ebay auction that I had been too lazy to fix and chopped them up a bit.

This poor marine took a few hits to the noggin.

Ow! My arm! Oh! The humanity! The humanity!

Carving up the marines was fun. Drill bits, hobby knife, clippers…teeth. All were used to desecrate the statues of these marines! Okay. Maybe not teeth.

I made the rookie mistake of poking bullet holes and carving impact cracks into the foamcore before gluing on any details. I know exactly how it happened too. I was cleaning up a few edges of the foam and was like, I’ll just put an impact crack here. Then I grabbed the pin and added bullet holes and before I knew it, I had no space to put on actual bits details.

I did manage to squeeze in a sword or two on the sides at least. I cut up a few Dark Angels vehicle symbols. I mean…I have a million of those flat-winged swords, so why not?

Lastly, I glued down some scouring pad to represent dirt inside each statue area. I’ll be gluing down some sand over it along with a few clumps of grass to represent the days when these statues were respected.

For painting, I expect it’ll be the same grays I use to paint the rest of my cities. I’m considering defacing the statues with Chaos script, but then it won’t match anything I’ve done so far. But so what? It doesn’t have to match, does it?

Comments are appreciated! I’ll post an update next Tuesday on the progress.